Discovery of a Remarkable Opposition Surge on Triton

Details Discovery of a Remarkable Opposition Surge on Triton Discovery of a Remarkable Opposition Surge on Triton

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agusm.p33a..02b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P33A-02

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6260 Neptunian Satellites, 6261 Triton

Scientific paper

The large Neptunian satellite Triton is one of three moons in the outer Solar System that exhibit volcanism. Triton's volcanoes appear to be driven by solar heating. In addition, significant seasonal volatile is expected to occur on Triton. To understand the nature and extent of activity on Triton, including volcanism and seasonal volatile transport, we have undertaken a program of deriving the surface properties of Triton through time by means of ground- based observations. Another motivation for our work is to closely study a body that may bear a strong resemblance to the planet Pluto and the swarm of icy bodies in the outer Solar System now known as Kuiper Belt Objects. One important measurement is the solar phase curve, or the brightness as a function of the angle between the observer, the object being observed, and the sun. Most significant are observations at large solar phase angles, which probe the roughness of the surface, and small angles, which characterize the fluffiness of the surface and give clues to optical phenomena such as coherent backscatter. For Triton, large phase angles are not observable from Earth, but the 2004 season presented an opportunity in which the solar phase angle reached the exceedingly low value of 0.002 degrees. During the 2004 season, photometric observations of Triton's phase curve were obtained in the astronomical BVRI filters, spanning wavelengths from 0.45 to 0.89 microns. Triton exhibits a large increase in its brightness as the solar phase angle approaches zero. There is a wavelength dependence to this opposition surge, the term commonly used to describe the non-linear increase in brightness observed on almost all airless bodies.

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